I was born here, in Santa María de Atzompa. My parents are from here as well.  My mom's name was Teodora Blanco. She was the one who taught me to work the clay, to make clay figures such as mermaids, nativity scenes, musicians, angels, various figures. She was the first one who started these kinds of clay characters in town. I've been working with clay, for about 50 years and still making the figures that my mother taught me. And I have four children, also all involved in pottery making.

I am originally from Santa María Atzompa... I was born and raised right here. My siblings and I were a soccer team, ha! Eleven brothers and sisters. Eight currently alive. I'm the ninth child.Pottery has been my whole life, from my great-grandmother, whom we remember, to today. My grandmother taught us. She told us that she learned from her mom, and was passed down from mom to mom for generations, until it got to us. Each mother became who she is thanks to the pottery.

We started making macramés for our own home, because we were looking for something unique and different. So we decided to go to a Mayan village in Yucatan to find the traditional macramé makers. 

We went almost every week, two or three days per week, to learn with them. From the start I was creating new things, we were exploring new ways to make macramés together. We were learning to create new concepts together.

Macramé is a human, global and ancient technique. You can find macramé all around the world. Not specifically the same designs, but you can see knots everywhere. It is how you use them and how you create new things with them that makes it unique. The strength of our brand is how we reimagine the knots with a new perspective, new designs and incorporating techniques that we learned in the Mayan villages, and new techniques we discover along the way.

I grew up in Teotitlan del Valle with my grandmother. I always said she was my mother. Honestly, I did not have a mother or a father. I was told that my parents died when I was little--first my mother, and a year after, my father. My great-great-grandmother made candles. My great-grandfather father learned to do it from her, and later my grandmother learned to do it from him. And then she thought me. Candle-making is a tradition that is more than 300-400 years-old in my family. 

I started working with clay as a child, because my mother had a workshop. One day, she told me “You know what son? You have to help me.” Many of my siblings had gone to the United States, my sisters met their husbands and went to their new homes, so it was up to me and my other younger sibling to help out. I opened this new workshop at the end of 2020--it's still new. It was difficult hen I started selling my work because many people of the town criticized me, saying I was destroying a millenary tradition. It brought them conflict, but I...

I was sixteen years old when I started working in my father's workshop. I worked a lot the “green chia" style. We sold a lot to Japan--a lot of turtles, angels, that was we did where my dad worked. A few years ago, after years of working clay, sales became very variable our town of Santa María Atzompa. Everyone worked the same techniques, so there is a very tough competition. It was hard to make any profit. I was ready to give up and retire. But I was reminded that my grandfather had taught me other techniques to work the clay that worked beautifully. Traditions that has been passed...

In 2010 I opened Taller Ocho in my native town of Teotitlán del Valle--a workshop with residencies, working with artists and the community. That's how I wanted the workshop to function, not so much production workshop.  In the workshop, we see the problem that local young people are now removed from the textile. The same had happened to me growing up, I lived that experience. So the idea was to work with young people and inviting contemporary artists. The first rules of the workshop were that we don't invite textile artists and don't get involved with anyone who dedicates themselves to textiles. Since the community already knows the weaving...

I have always liked archaeological pieces. I was always struck by those finishes, the colors, and the pieces that our grandparents made. That's where the idea of ​​making the pieces the gray, black, red, but in natural clay came from, without using chemicals or so many colors that were introduced to Mexico later. This taller was born from there – from wanting to make some finishes more attached to the color of the clay. That's how the idea came about. At the beginning my work was more sculpture, not so much utilitarian. I always liked making figures more. I have always liked that...

Abuelita Borrego started about 4 years ago in “Los Altos de Chiapas”. I lived there for a  little more than a year, and began to work with communities of artisan women and indigenous peoples, giving product development workshops. It was an exchange of knowledge--I did not charge for these workshops and brought my own materials. They wanted to learn. In exchange, they fed me and paid for my transportation. This is how the project began. The name derives from the original Tzotzil peoples in Chiapas. The women there are in charge of taking care of the sheep (sheep is "borrego" in Spanish), taking them to the...